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Author Message
~M~
Board Administrator
Username: mjm

Post Number: 33560
Registered: 11-1998
Posted on Saturday, March 21, 2009 - 5:59 pm:   Edit Post Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post

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Dear Membership – In between all the other things we try to do, steve and I have been attending numerous poetry readings and performances. About a week ago, we were able to attend a reading by a poet who was unfamiliar to us. The attendance at this poet’s reading was very small, which was fortunate and unfortunate. Unfortunate because more people really should have experienced him, and fortunate because the group was so small, it made for a more intimate experience and allowed us personal access to him.

His name is Jay Leeming. Leeming, a lifelong resident of Ithica, New York, is a slender, long-legged, soft-spoken poet with a sense of humor. His poems are works of art, each carefully crafted until the words are reduced to mean just what he intends. He paints lovely pictures of everyday life, relationships and moments in time between two souls. Leeming has studied with Robert Bly, who praises his work and often reads it at his own performances.

Leeming is not only a great poet, but a wonderful performer. His humor and his charm are infectious. I purchased his book Dynamite on a China Plate, and am so glad that I did. He has kept me amused, entertained, and informed every night this past week. This book earned Jay the 2003 Readers’ Choice Award. His subject matter is sometimes very offbeat, yet still accessible and welcoming. Leeming is also an accomplished musician, and the rhythms of music are evident in the way he puts words together on a page. I can assure you that the poems in this volume are definitely worth the cover price.

Dynamite on a China Plate by Jay Leeming is available in the WPF BookShop under “Admin’s Featured Five-Star Book Picks."

Love,
M (Administrator)

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Dynamite on a China Plate by Jay Leeming
__________________________________________________________________


BOOK DESCRIPTION

Excerpt from Back Cover:

“Jay Leeming has his own way of thinking which isn’t like anyone else’s. His most individual poems come from that surprising angle of vision that mark him as a real poet. His poems are witty, winged beings that dive straight to the playful, lunatic heart of human companionship.”
-- Robert Bly

“These poems are a delight to read. They move effortlessly between the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious, accounting for the multiplicity of human desire and imagination.”
-- Li-Young Lee

“Jay Leeming writes like an angel. Luminous, startling poems that lift and transform – once you experience them, it is quite possible you will begin, immediately to need them. This is a very good sign.”
-- Naomi Shihab Nye

“Every poem in Dynamite on a China Plate drenches us like the wake of a blue whale suddenly breaching from someone’s suburban lawn pool, where at first we might think the beast lost or out of place, we quickly realize it is we who are lost and that the courageous occurrences of such unlikely deep diving poems as “Supermarket Historians” is trying to find us, asking our hearts to weep out a greater water of grief and laughter big enough for us all to jump in and be beautifully lost together.”
-- Martin Prechtel



EDITORIAL REVIEWS

Excerpt from a Book Review by Kirk Pinho, Blackwarrior:

“Leeming is not a volatile or explosive poet, even in his funniest moments. Rather, he is a deliberate wordsmith, one with the tact and restraint that allows for more than the Wow at the linguistic apex.

His 83-page collection is nuanced, and yet, even when his most humorous moments are paired with somber subjects, he maintains a tonal uniformity, a significant feat.

He works as comfortably in six lines as he does in 100, with line breaks and without, and his talent with memory and human interaction is inspirational. It’s hard not to conjure images of a poet like Robert Bly—who offers considerable praise for this collection on its back cover—writing poems like these, a series which manages to be sparse yet expansive, serious yet silly. This is a poet of contradictions who accomplishes an impressive feat in his first collection.”


TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE

The Barber
Apple
Red Autumn Bells
I Want to Go Back
Taking a Bath
Middle of the Night
The Beams of My Parents’ House
Rowboat
Typing Class
Copier
Feedback
Lament of the Recording Engineer
Exit, with Moose

PART TWO

At Golgatha
He Breathes Out Slowly
Crows
Dream of Russia
What is the Door
Six Colors

PART THREE

The Comedian’s Ten Songs
I Pick up a Hitchhiker
Lawn Service
“Thirty Seconds,” Said the Soundman
Law Office
Supermarket Historians
Conversation with Nobody
Organ Music
A Demonstration Against Cargill Agricultural Company
Song of the Poison in the Executioner’s Needle
Nicollet Island Bonfire
The Light Above Cities

PART FOUR

Boxes and Oceans

PART FIVE

Man Writes Poem
Ego
A Theory of Personality
Joke
Jazz for the Widow of Ice Cream
Man in a Lighted Room at Sundown
Van Gogh: “Self-Portrait in Straw Hat” and “Woman Peeling Potatoes”
Subway at Rush Hour
Circe
Mosaic
In Summer
Her Name Written in Pencil on the Wall Beside the Phone
Grandpa Putting Salt on His Ice Cream
Sugarhouse
She Killed the Spider
Driving a Retarded Girl to Lake Minnetonka
Scrubbing a Pan
Moving Away
Secret River


SAMPLE POEMS:

Supermarket Historians

All historians should be supermarket cashiers.
Imagine what we’d learn;
“Your total comes to $10.66,
and that’s the year the Normans invaded Britain.”
Or, “That’ll be $18.61, the year
the Civil War began.”

Now all my receipts are beaches
where six-year-olds find bullets in the sand.
My tomatoes add up to Hiroshima,
and if I’d bought one more carton of milk,
the cashier would be discussing the Battle of the Bulge
and not the Peloponnesian War.

But I’m tired of buying soup cans
full of burning villages,
tired of hearing the shouts of Marines
storming beaches in the bread aisle.
I want to live in a house
carved into a seed
inside a watermelon –
to look up at the red sky
as shopping carts roll through the aisles
like distant thunder.


Law Office

I am sitting in an adjustable chair on the 32nd floor of a skyscraper in New York City. I am typing a list of a thousand names into a computer. As I work I am listening through headphones to a recording of the journals of Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who traveled to the United States in the 15th century. The office is air-conditioned and I am wearing a tie. A hurricane has drowned half of de Vaca’s crew, and most of the rest are sick and dying of starvation on an island off the Florida Keys. The names I am entering are plaintiffs in a case against Union Carbide chemical company, and about half of them are deceased. Some filing cabinets are behind me; one is marked “Bhopal” and another reads “Breast Implants.” The secretary sitting beside me goes to get a cup of coffee. De Vaca and his crew have eaten their horses, and are now sailing in a makeshift raft that uses their hides for sails. I keep tying. At noon a man comes through the office and waters all the plants. Every hour another sailor dies of pneumonia, or loses his grip and slides off the raft into the storm.
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Teresa White
Advanced Member
Username: teresa_white

Post Number: 1802
Registered: 01-2005
Posted on Saturday, March 21, 2009 - 9:33 pm:   Edit Post Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post

M,

Thanks for the info on Jay Leeming. Definitely one I'll be reading.

~T.
Be satisfied that ye have enough light to secure another foothold. Anon.
Emusing
Senior Member
Username: emusing

Post Number: 7342
Registered: 08-2003
Posted on Sunday, March 22, 2009 - 1:50 pm:   Edit Post Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post

M this looks like a terrific poet and a worthy read. Another to add to my list. Thanks for posting this. I truly enjoyed the poem and I could imagine what a great treat it was to hear him read.

Love,
e
Word Walker Press; Moonday Poetry;
Kyoto Journal